J.W.Anderson / Fall 2014 RTW

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Just as J.W. Anderson has been invested in by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH (it’s taken a minority stake) and been taken on as creative director of Loewe, he’s been thinking anti-luxe aesthetics as the starting point for his fall collection: the work of the sculptors and painters of the British postwar austerity years. “I was reading a book about the painter Graham Sutherland, who said, ‘you have to destroy in order to gain,’” he explained backstage to a post-show audience that may or may not be familiar with the English modernist movement of the forties and fifties and the oeuvres of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Anyway: not to worry. The short explanation of his collection is that this young designer is still in the phase of his career in which he’s not afraid to experiment. In this case, with abstract cutting and a feeling he describes as “something more grounded. Muddy textures. The imperfect.”

Well, clear aside the intellectual references for a minute, and what you’ll see is the shift in the silhouette—the ankle-length skirts, exaggerated, cap-sleeve tops, and the odd, flat, wrapped slipper-like shoes which go with them. Anyone with a quick eye for the main JWA purchase would immediately zoom in on the skirts—elongated A-lines which sit just below the navel and end just above the ankle. You’d have to be a full-time radical conceptualist to want to wear the total look, but styled with a boot or another sort of heel, those skirts have fashion-legs. Try as he might, Anderson can’t completely disguise his primary talent for identifying a commercial bestseller.

Still, you have to admire the nonconformist impulses of a young designer who wants to push himself toward new forms of expression. Since last fall, he’s designed a menswear collection; a pre-fall collection; traveled between London, Paris, and Madrid; and prepared the relaunch of Loewe for spring 2015. If his essay in “imperfection” wasn’t perfect in some aspects of its fit, this was a collection that shows the courage of self-conviction—and quite enough to keep the fashion world talking.